Episode 445: Dinosaurs in Swamps: Featuring Prehistoric Planet 2. Pachycephalosaurus head-butting, Austroraptor fishing, T. rex stalking prey at night, and more dinosaur action in the Cretaceous swamps

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The dinosaur of the day: Falcatakely

• Lived at same time and place as the animals featured in episode 3 of Prehistoric Planet 2
• Enantiornithean that lived in the Late Cretaceous in what is now northern Madagascar (Maevarano Formation)
• About crow-sized
• Had a deep, long beak, about 3.5 in (9 cm) long
• Beak looked similar to a toucan’s
• As an enantiornithine, in many ways, would have looked like a modern bird
• Had a high, long face that looked like a modern bird
• But had teeth in the premaxilla
• Described by Patrick O’Connor and others in 2020
• Found a nearly complete, well preserved skull in 2010
• CT scanned the skull in 2017
• Skull is small, at about 3 in (8 cm) long
• Parts of the fossil are paper thin
• Maxilla is less than 1 mm thick
• Had a narrow preorbital region (in front of the eye socket)
• Type and only species is Falcatakely forsterae
• Genus name means “small scythe”, and refers to the shape of the beak
• Species name is in honor of Catherine Forster’s “contributions to work on Madagascan paravians”
• Unexpected that it looked superficially like a toucan
• Example of convergent evolution (Falcatakely evolved the toucan-like beak tens of millions of years before toucans and other modern birds, and they’re pretty distantly related)
• Found a complex series of grooves on the bone that showed it had a large beak
• Had a beak shape like a modern bird, with a high, long upper bill
• However, the face had similar bones as Velociraptor and other non-avian dinosaurs
• Like non-avian dinosaurs, had a bone under its beak and a large upper jawbone (a large maxilla and small premaxilla), unlike modern birds where there is just one bone under the beak (the premaxilla)
• Probably used its beak for a lot of purposes, including moving objects, grooming, and feeding
• Lived in a swampy floodplain that had wet and dry seasons

Fun Fact:

T. rex had the largest eyes of any dinosaur. But several modern animals have larger eyes than even the largest T. rex.

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